Can you explain this? I'm not arguing with the statements, and I've seen similar ones here, but am genuinely curious as to what you mean, given that other companies seem to update their machines on a much more frequent basis (compared to 2 and 3 years).
I will give you a short summary of my post here, and then proceed to discuss it in detail below. The detailed explanation will be humongous. Short summary: I do not agree that Apple has in any form neglected or abandoned the Mac (aside the Mac Mini)! The Macs see less updates now, but this has simply to with the fact that the industry itself updates the CPUs/GPUs less frequently. And the configurations have gotten more complicated: you have expensive higher-end CPUs (which Apple uses) which don't get that many updates and often suffer from poor yields and other issues, but you also have cheaper low-end CPUs (of the type that Dell/Microsoft uses) which are available earlier. Don't fall for the marketing hype, look what you actually get. I remember the outrage when Dell has released the Kaby Lake CPU and everyone was criticising Apple for still using Skylake — but very few people noticed that the only available Kaby Lake at the time was the low-end 15W chip while Apple were using high-end 28W chips...
Now to more detail (to whom is interested in this stuff):
Take the 15" MacBook Pro. In October 2013, it received the Haswell CPU, and next year, in July 2014, got a slight CPU frequency bump. Then, in may 2015 it got a GPU upgrade (the M370X), while the CPU remained unchanged. Finally, in November 2016 we have a new TB model with Skylake CPUs and new Polaris GPUs. On paper, we have a computer that had basically the same CPU for 3 years, without any upgrades, and the same GPU for over a hear, without any upgrades. Which looks terrible.
Until we look at the actual market.
The Haswell CPUs used in the previous iteration of the MBP are high-end chips which feature the fastest Intel's integrated GPU (at that time) and 128MB of L4 cache. This CPU was launched in June 2013, so basically it was very new when Apple adopted it. Fast forward to 2014. The only change in Intel's CPU lineup are 'new' models which are basically fe Mhz faster — the MBP gets these updates immediately (one months after they are released). GPU is a bit more complicated: the Nvidia's 850M was a prime candidate for the MBP and drivers for it were found in OS X. Which means that they have actually planned to use Nvidia's GPUs. However, something must have happened that ruined the deal. Maybe they coil't reach an agreement suitable for both parties, maybe Nvidia was not able or willing to supply as many GPUs as Apple needed (don't forget that Apple ships more of the same laptop configuration than any other manufacturer, so they need insane numbers of components!) — we might never know. At any rate, the MBP would never see Maxwell.
What happens then? Apple updates the GPU the first chance they get, which is in May 2015. Because Maxwell is not available for them, they have to do with a custom energy-optimised chip from AMD, which is a compromise at best. At that time, no better CPU than what MBP already has is available. Note that the 13" get the Broadwell upgrade, which was available. The Broadwell CPUs with high-end GPUs, which are suitable for the 15" model get released in June 2015, later than expected, but the chip itself is essentially vapourware. I am not aware of a single laptop shipping with these. No idea whether its because Intel couldn't make sufficient quantities or because no-one was interesting. At any rate, with Skylake scheduled to be released just few months after, nobody really cares much for Broadwell anyway.
And here things get interesting. The Skylake CPUs that are currently in the 2016 model were actually released in September 2015. But of course, these chips were not a suitable replacement for the venerable Haswell chips in the MBP, because they lacked the high-end Iris Pro graphics. The corresponding chips were then launched in Q1 2016 — but their actual availability seems a mystery. Again, I am not aware of any laptops really using those chips. And there is honestly no reason why Apple would not use them — if they could. So my guess is that Intel simply was not able to make them in bulk. We also know that Intel started winding down their Iris Pro initiative at the same time, again, we can try to guess as to why, but its not really relevant at this point. We just have to assume that the Iris Pro was not available to Apple for some reason.
So, what could Apple do in this situation? They could update to Skylake — and essentially downgrade the graphics, or they could wait. What they did is release a new MBP the exact moment they had access to a faster GPU generation — in fact, they got it before anyone else on the market (my guess is that Apple simply bought up the entire supply of the higher-quality Polaris 11 chips). They ditched the fast iGPU, but made the dGPU mandatory again. And again, they did it at the first moment when the hardware to do so was available.
I am sorry for such a long post, but I thought that in order to bring my point over, some level of detail was necessary. All in all, I believe that if one makes the attempt to look at what was available at the market at any given point, it becomes very clear that Apple was trying very hard to keep the components in its laptop line up to date — as much as it made sense.
The same is also true for the desktop line (in a fashion). The iMac has pretty much been kept up to date. And I fully expect it to get new Kaby Lake CPUs + updated Polaris 10 in spring. The Mac Pro could have been upgraded earlier, but again, we are talking about server tech here, which often lags behind a bit. I am more then sure that there will be a new Mac Pro with Vega+Broadwell (or even Skylake, if they get released by then) CPUs. The Mac Mini is in a very sad state, yes, and its the only machine where I agree that it seems to be abandoned.
